Fuddland

Summer has hit Suzhou with its full force, which means several days of sweltering heat [pushing 40°C] followed by torrential rainstorms which, although a welcome break from the sun, turn the streets into dirty rivers and bring sticky humidity when the temperatures rise again the following day. It’s a far cry from the refreshing change of the final week of my holiday a few months back, which I spent on the southernmost shores of the southernmost part of China, the provincial island of Hainan.

I admit I was fairly dubious about visiting a beach resort out here, and while it wasn’t quite up to the standards I’ve seen while visiting Nantucket or Cancun, the water was clean enough, and the beaches were kept rubbish-free despite the generally carefree Chinese attitude to littering. [Some days it’s all I can do to pick up the sweet wrapper that the kids in front of me have just thrown on the ground and thrust it back into their hands, but then a street-cleaner usually sweeps it away before I have a chance to move. This obviously works for them, but for someone with a deep-ingrained aversion to dropping litter, the lack of convenient bins every few hundred metres means I sometimes walk for miles with a sticky ice-cream wrapper flapping about in my hand.]

All along the south-east shores of the town of Sanya are lavish hotels and resorts with private beaches, but being a man on a budget I stayed in the Dadonghai area, home to two youth hostels, the better of which I found to be the Blue Sky International Youth Hostel. It was right around the corner from a very nice stretch of beach, with plenty of restaurants overlooking the sea and lots of street vendors peddling deliciously fresh fruit—I’ve never tasted better mangos.

The area is apparently astoundingly popular with Russian holidaymakers—so much so that most of the shops and roadsigns are displayed in both Chinese and Russian, although a Ukrainian woman that I met at the hostel told me that the Russian was mostly as amusingly wrong as much of the Chinglish that can be seen all over the country.

Walk a few hundred yards away from this vibrant, luxurious district and you find several huge hotels that have gone out of business. It was quite eerie walking around these deserted places, which looked as though everyone had simply walked out one day and never come back: through the padlocked glass doors, I could see plants that had wilted and died in the lobby, newspapers on the coffee tables; the adjacent restaurants still had their tables and chairs set out. [I half-expected the Chinese name of the hotel to translate as Mary Celeste.] A large smelly skip was thankfully downwind from the currently-populated areas.

Between these two areas were small groups of local fisherman, whole families catching crabs and molluscs, and—to be expected—more than a few wedding photo sessions taking advantage of the scenic backdrops. Despite not being much of a beach person, I did enjoy my week or so walking with the soft sand between my toes, my breakfasts of coconut jam on toast, and the surreal experience of Chinese taxi drivers and waiters trying to speak to me in Russian.